12/18/2008 @ 6:00PM

The Most Expensive Fictional Houses

What does a sprawling 40,000 acre, mountain-top Pacific estate have in common with a centimeters-tall green plastic house?

Simple–they are both featured on our first ever listing of the world’s most expensive fictional houses.

In honor of our annual Forbes Fictional 15 ranking of the richest fictional characters, we sacked the collective imagination and identified the world’s most expensive fictional homes. In the interest of sanity, we laid down a few ground-rules.

First, all the properties had to be primarily residences (no schools, evil lairs or Death Stars) and we excluded castles (sorry Cinderella, Dracula). Then, in the interest of variety, we limited our selections to no more than one or two of a “type.” Otherwise, the list would have been overwhelmed by English country estates of the sort where 19th century ladies are overcome by mannered young gentlemen with 10,000 pounds a year. Finally, we eliminated any selections that were deemed too obscure (goodbye, House of Leaves).

The resulting list spans the real estate gamut, from Tony Stark’s sweet bachelor-pad in Iron Man ($50.8 million) to Tara ($17.2 million), the antebellum plantation from Gone with the Wind. The source material was equally varied, ranging from videogames (Croft Manor from Tomb Raider, $46.1 million) to literature (Jay Gatsby’s West Egg mansion from The Great Gatsby, $42.5 million).

The most expensive fictional home? Xanadu, the home of newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. Modeled on Hearst Castle, the real life San Simeon, Calif., estate of media mogul William Randolph Hearst, Xanadu was supposed to have been built on a private mountain from 20,000 tons of marble and 100,000 trees. It contained enough art for 10 museums, and the grounds were home to the world’s largest private zoo. Although the film claims “Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself” since the Pyramids, we price it more modestly, at $160 million.

The cheapest home on our list is the House of Usher from Edgar Allen Poe’s 1839 classic short story, The Fall of the House of Usher. The House of Usher is definitely creepy, possibly sentient and located on a spooky, glowing bog. We estimate it can be yours for just $10.6 million, shriekings and clankings included.

Many of our fictional properties sport unusual amenities. Burns Manor from The Simpsons, worth $127 million, features a bottomless pit, a room containing 1,000 monkeys banging on 1,000 typewriters and a robotic Richard Simmons. And Batman’s home, Wayne Manor, valued at $105 million, includes access to a 27,000 square-foot, climate-controlled cave system, as well as sleeping quarters for “teenage wards.”

Our favorite properties on the list are probably most abstract–like the House on Boardwalk ($51 million for four) and Barbie’s Dream House ($16 million). Some will argue that these modest structures do not belong on this list. We disagree. If anything, they should be priced millions of dollars higher, for enriching the imagination of generations.